Mittellateinisches Jahrbuch

Fictor o poeta? La figura del poeta nelle glosse all’Ars poetica di Orazio

Lisa Ciccone — Mo, 29 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0200

Lisa Ciccone: Fictor or poeta? The concept of a poet in the glosses to Horace’s Ars poetica

This essay examines the presence of the term poet in Late antique and Medieval glosses to Horace’s Ars poetica. It is one of the ﬁrst results of the work carried out for the Thesaurus Glossarum et Commentariorum, a new research tool being developed at the University of Zurich
as part of the project The Ancient World seen from medieval glosses. In the Pseudoachrones and Porphyryon the lemma poet is used almost only to paraphrase the Horatian text; in the glosses of the 11th and 12th centuries it appears in teachings that are in fact addressed to the orator or at least to the author of prose; in the 14th century it ﬁnally corresponds to such a precise identity that it can also be distinguished from the lemma auctor; in the commentary of the humanist Cristoforo Landino the name poet ﬁnally indicates a creator who, given due pro-portion, imitates God. The evolution of the idea of the poet strongly depends on the new consideration of poetry, which in Dante’s era is considered an autonomous science with respect to both grammar and rhetoric and is counted among the sciences useful for the formation of the medieval learner, belonging as much to the sermocinal part as to the moral and natural part of philosophy.

Glossograﬁa bassomedievale alle Georgiche

Giandomenico Tripodi — Mo, 29 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0200

Giandomenico Tripodi: Late Medieval Glossography on the Georgics

This paper aims to trace the evolution of the exegesis of Virgil’s Georgics by analyzing key developments and the relationship between Servius and the exegetes of the late Middle Ages. In particular, the study focuses on two pivotal moments in the exegetical history of the Georgics: twelfth-century France and fourteenth-century Italy. As of the ﬁrst, the paper examines the commentaries produced in Laon (Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Lat. 3713, and London, British Library, Additional 16380) and Orléans (Berlin, Staatsbibliothek, Lat. fol. 34, and London, British Library, Additional 33220). These are analyzed from both a paleographic-codicological and exegetical perspective, highlighting similarities such as the use of Macrobius as an exegetical source and differences such as the structure of the exegesis. Regarding the fourteenth-century Italian tradition, the paper evaluates the Virgilian exegesis produced in Bologna, focusing on the signiﬁcant innovations found in the recollecte of Giovanni del Virgilio (Vatican City, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Vat. lat. 5990, and Padua, Biblioteca Universitaria, 1084) and Benvenuto da Imola, both of whom introduced a new usus exponendi and offered critiques of the long-lasting auctoritas of Servius.

Gli storici latini nel commento di Albertino Mussato all’Octavia pseudosenecana

Soﬁa Brusa — Mo, 29 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0200

Soﬁa Brusa: Latin Historians in Albertino Mussato’s Commentary on the Pseudo-Senecan Octavia

The Paduan early humanist Albertino Mussato commented on Seneca’s tragedies, likely in order to provide an edition of the work with exegetic paratexts. His commentary, consisting of a Senecan biography, argumenta to the ten plays, and marginal glosses, was probably left unﬁn-ished and is preserved fragmentarily. The section on Octavia, the only play of Roman subject in the corpus, includes a relevant number of glosses (30 out of c. 130), a signal of Mussato’s interest in this tragedy, and stands out for the use of historical sources to elucidate the ancient drama. This paper focuses on the employment of Suetonius, publishing and discussing the four passages in which the Roman historian is explicitly mentioned. Particular attention is given to a gloss containing a spurious epigraph on Lucan and information gained from Eusebius-Hieronymus’ Chronicon. In spite of a solid knowledge of Suetonius, Mussato’s reconstruction of historical events reveals a number of slips and differences from his narration. This is tentatively explained with two reasons: on the one hand, the conviction that Octavia offered a peculiar account independent from the sources; on the other hand, a mnemonic use of the historian, causing several inaccuracies on the part of Mussato.

Commentatore per professione: temi ricorrenti e luoghi paralleli nelle expositiones di Nicola Trevet OP (c. 1258 – post 1334)

Jakub Kujawiński — Mo, 29 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0200

Jakub Kujawiński: A Commentator by Profession: Recurrent Topics and Parallel Places in the Expositions of Nicholas Trevet OP (c. 1258 – after 1334)

Nicholas Trevet’s commentaries range from biblical exegeses to expositions of the authors of Christian and Classical antiquity. Previous scholarship, however, has paid insufficient attention to how Trevet pro-duced this variety in a relatively short time. The issue can be addressed by looking at select topics that recur in several commentaries. First, by comparing the explanations of the labours of Hercules in the commen-taries on Boethius’s Consolation, Seneca’s Tragedies, and St Augustine’s City of God, this study reveals how Trevet accumulated and reused his knowledge of classical culture. Second, by examining the information Trevet provides about Livy, this article shows how Trevet dealt with the scarce evidence relating to the Roman historian that was available in his times. In his early commentary on St Jerome’s Letter to Paulinus, for example, Trevet used uncommon sources, viz. Seneca the Elder’s Controversiae and Flavius Josephus, but he was not directly familiar with Livy’s work. He only came to know the Livian corpus when commissioned to expound on the ﬁrst and third decades and gradually developed an approximate idea of the work’s original scope, as illustrated in the commentary on the City of God. This comparative approach enables a more comprehensive understanding of Trevet’s legacy.

Per Petrarca e Cola di Rienzo: Pietas pastoralis nello specchio della più antica esegesi

Giovanni Cascio — Mo, 29 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0200

Giovanni Cascio: On Petrarch and Cola di Rienzo: Pietas pastoralis in the mirror of its earliest exegesis

Moving from Petrarch’s conception of pastoral poetry, the article focuses on some controversial passages of Pietas pastoralis, the ﬁfth eclogue of Bucolicum carmen meum, written in the summer of 1347 to celebrate the political actions of Cola di Rienzo. Speciﬁcally, the study aims to explore the relationship between Petrarch’s self-exegesis, as presented in Dispersa 11, the letter accompanying the eclogue sent to Cola, and what is considered the most authoritative commentary on the Bucolicum, known as the ›Anonymous Commentary‹.

Commentare e tradurre: Bartolomeo Fonzio, Giovanni Tortelli e il ms. Berlin, Kupferstichkabinett, 78 C 26 per Ercole I d’Este

Cecilia Sideri — Mo, 29 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0200

Cecilia Sideri: Translating and Glossing One’s Own Translation: Bartolomeo Fonzio, Giovanni Tortelli and MS Berlin, Kupferstichkabinett, 78 C 26 for Ercole I of Este

The article analyses a series of autograph glosses written by the Florentine humanist Bartolomeo Fonzio on the dedication copy of his vernacularization of Lucian’s Περὶ μὴ τοῦ ῥᾳδίως πιστέυειν τῇ διαβολῇ (Calumniae non temere credendum), composed in 1472 for Ercole I of Este.
The paper argues that the explanatory glosses for the Duke of Ferrara, rather than being the result of an erudite research by Fonzio, consist in a simpliﬁed vernacular rendering of entries of Giovanni Tortelli’s De orthographia, a crucial reference work that was extensively used by the Florentine humanist in the 1460s – 1470s.

Adelheid Wellhausen, Nachruf: Peter Dinter (1935 – 2024)

Peter Dinter — Mo, 29 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0200

Adelheid Wellhausen, Nachruf: Peter Dinter (1935 – 2024)

Pratiche di commento fra Medioevo e Umanesimo: tradizione e innovazioni Vormoderne Praktiken des Kommentierens: Tradition und Innovationen

Sofia Brusa — Mo, 29 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0200

Pratiche di commento fra Medioevo e Umanesimo:
tradizione e innovazioni
Vormoderne Praktiken des Kommentierens:
Tradition und Innovationen

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Mo, 29 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0200